Nothing is as toxic as a really bad idea. Hundreds of millions of dollars are still being spent in "scientific" pursuit of disaster scenarios about the earth, fiddling with infinitely variable computer models. This isn't science; the burden of proof has flipped to the skeptics, which does not happen in real science. Albert Einstein had to predict observable outcomes before his ideas were accepted. Watson and Crick had to prove the helical structure of DNA before anybody took them seriously. But in Global Frauding it's the skeptics who are supposed to prove that the latest computer model is not true. If they manage that, the crooks just make up a new computer model. It's a sort of card sharper trick. A con artist can always move faster than the suckers.(Continue reading...)
Monday, September 5, 2011
On Being Governed By Scientific Frauds
This article over at American Thinker is a tad hyperbolic, but this paragraph makes it all worthwhile:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
When you hear or read about such and such a computer model predicts some outcome. Well it is always a probability percentage that it will be true.
ReplyDeleteThe better the model, the better it reflects the real world for whatever model it is for. Weather as a whole for example is one of the hardest to model well, however it can produce a predict of greater than 60-90%. Once they are doing better than 50% then you have a better percentage that it will be correct.
In other words, once a model of whatever is predicting to a high degree, the closer to reality it is and the more you can rely on it for useful information in planning your future activities.
It is not a waste money, unless they are creating false models and/or are not actively perusing models that will be useful to humanity.
I write software for a living. I happen to know that computer models are self-fulfilling prophecies. Buggy self-fulfilling prophecies.
ReplyDeleteComputer models are based on what we already know, but they cannot account for what we do not know, or what we don't know that we don't know. That's the difference between real experiments and thought experiments. Thought experiments are fine as long as you back them up with real experiments.
Another problem with climate models is that they model the climate, not the weather. Weather models are being used legitimately to predict the weather (although not with enough reliability on which to base liberty-sucking public policy, IMHO). Furthermore, researchers continuously feed error information back into the weather models, refining and improving the model.
However, you cannot use a model to predict what kind of climate change will occur when you introduce something (such as human-liberated CO2) without real experimental data. There is no experiment that you could run that can provide this information.
I would not have a problem with computer climate modeling as long as the "scientists" want to engage in this kind of mental masturbation on their own dime, and don't try to impose their fantasies on me as public policy.